The Expanse season 2
- Thread starter RAMA
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Deleting this post to protect the spoilerphobes. It was speculation based on what's been presented on screen so far, but as I've also read the books, and know how the books handled the plot moving forward, it's just safer to get rid of the whole thing. Have to protect the sweet, virgin eyes of the pure! Don't need the mob mentality coming after me.
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But the floor was the wrong way. As you say, the "floor" should be the interior surface of the asteroid, or a surface parallel to it -- but they showed it as perpendicular instead. If you were on a catwalk built on the surface, then the surface would be your "roof" -- essentially it would be upside-down relative to the way real gravity works. But the way they showed it, the surface of the asteroid was beside them, not above them.
If what I've quoted (and put in a spoiler tag) is anything from the books, I'd appreciate it if you'd put spoiler tags around it. Or is it just speculation?
Oh, I misunderstood the situation. When Miller was watching the Nauvoo approach, it was moving vertically in his field of view, which I took to mean that he was on the outer portion of the cylinder as it rotated. But if he were on the polar face, then the starscape and the Nauvoo would appear to be moving in a circular path from his field of view, and focusing on just one side of that would look like it was moving vertically. So, yeah, thanks for clearing that up for me.
That was quite the episode.
So the protomatter has goals, but lacks agency and requires human sentience to enact them - using Julie's dreams to make the protomatter controlled Eros fly into Earth. When Miller wakes her, she then is able to take control of the protometer and redirected it into Venus, where it crashes harmlessly.
Have I got that right?
So it's also possible the proto matter isn't a weapon as thought, but some kind of agent that changes humans, absorbing their sentience and changing them into a new form of advanced life.
Is it conquering and assimilating people Borg - like? Is it simply a virus, requiring human hosts to live? Is it the trigger to advancing humanity to the next level of existence? Is it a weapon to another species? Is it a tool of advancement belonging to another species? Is it a tool of communication, either of itself or from another species, that doesn't understand that it is "killing" people, only thinking it is linking them to allow them to eventually communicate with the proto matter itself or a species behind the protomatter?
Is the protomatter now going to infect and control Venus like it did Eros?
Lots of possibilities.
So the protomatter has goals, but lacks agency and requires human sentience to enact them - using Julie's dreams to make the protomatter controlled Eros fly into Earth. When Miller wakes her, she then is able to take control of the protometer and redirected it into Venus, where it crashes harmlessly.
Have I got that right?
So it's also possible the proto matter isn't a weapon as thought, but some kind of agent that changes humans, absorbing their sentience and changing them into a new form of advanced life.
Is it conquering and assimilating people Borg - like? Is it simply a virus, requiring human hosts to live? Is it the trigger to advancing humanity to the next level of existence? Is it a weapon to another species? Is it a tool of advancement belonging to another species? Is it a tool of communication, either of itself or from another species, that doesn't understand that it is "killing" people, only thinking it is linking them to allow them to eventually communicate with the proto matter itself or a species behind the protomatter?
Is the protomatter now going to infect and control Venus like it did Eros?
Lots of possibilities.
Miller said Venus when talking to Julie. Can't imagine it would be too good for the Martians if it was Mars if it hit.
Edit: Also, isn't Eros between Earth and Mars? Julie said she couldn't stop it, only redirect it. Seems unlikely she could turn it around that much, especially when she could just aim it straight at the sun or something.
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Well, you can relax, the stuff you quoted is confirmed within the first ten minutes of this week's episode.
I can say what happens in the novels in one word which taken out of context is vague enough to confuse you.
Stargate
It's Venus Miller even tells Julie to go to Venus.
Okay, now I got a nitpick with this week's episode. Having a "laptop" for the nuclear launch keys is the silliest thing I've ever seen. It's a common security feature for launch keys to be spaced out far enough that one person can't reach both slots, and I can't imagine this ever changing. Having both slots right next to each other is piss poor security for the device that can launch over a hundred nukes simultaneously.
Another nitpick one of the military officers at the briefing as a UN Navy pin on his uniform, but is addressed as "Colonel." As his uniform is different from the navy uniform, I'm guessing he's from another branch, so why does his uniform have the Navy pin on it?
@The Wormhole How close have they been keeping to the books?
Do you mean as in the device or as in a similar thing happened on the TV show? Like the protomatter are replicators?
Venus is (on average) closer to Earth than Mars is, though it all depends on where each planet is in its orbit at that moment. It's entirely possible that Venus was a closer target at the time that Julie redirected them away from Earth.
This felt very much like the climax of a book. Is this where the first novel ended? It's odd that they'd put it so early in a season.
And I was right about why Florence Faivre was still in the cast. I suspected she'd show up as the face and voice of the protomolecule -- although I expected it to be for more than one episode. I'm also a bit uncomfortable with how her meeting with Miller worked out. It felt too much like a male fantasy. The guy who's loved his dream woman from afar finds her at last, and she's helpless, nude, passive, and lying down, she needs him to tell her what to do, and she readily returns his love just like he always imagined, even though she's never even met him before. It seemed simplistic. Julie was more a quest object than a character from the beginning, and her one big moment here only compounded that. Heck, just staging the scene differently so that she was upright before him or floating above him instead of lying on her back would've improved the implied power dynamic.
Although it's kind of fitting, I guess, that both Julie's first scene in the series and her last depicted her with not-entirely-convincing CGI hair wafting around in microgravity. Except Miller and the bomb seemed subject to gravity, so why wasn't her hair?
I'm wondering if the protomolecule is going to terraform Venus. Although it'd be hard to do that without water. It would've been more convenient if it had crashed one of Saturn's ice moons into Venus instead of a rocky near-Earth asteroid. I've seen that suggested in some Venus-terraforming proposals.
Yup. The planets aren't all queued up in a straight line, they're circling around the Sun at various different speeds. A lot of the time, Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun while Earth and Venus are on the same side. Or vice-versa. It's constantly shifting. Not to mention that most spacecraft/object trajectories are curved paths rather than straight lines -- ellipses or parabolas or hyperbolas or more complex loop-de-loops shaped by the gravity of the Sun and the planets. A ship with one of those high-power drives they have in the show, or an asteroid propelled by Indistinguishable-From-Magic Drive, could probably come closer to a straight-line path, but it would still be affected by the Sun's gravity and thus have some curve to it. And of course everything's in motion, so you're not aiming for where something is, but for where it'll be when you get there.
This episode actually did a lot to reassure me that they haven't abandoned good science as I feared they had. The characters' dialogue about what was happening to Eros showed a good understanding of how physics should work, and there was a good use of time delay in the communications, although it was inconsistent in the scene between Chrisjen and her husband. (Also, where is he? I thought he was living on Mars, but the time delay was only a couple of seconds, consistent with the Moon.)
And I was right about why Florence Faivre was still in the cast. I suspected she'd show up as the face and voice of the protomolecule -- although I expected it to be for more than one episode. I'm also a bit uncomfortable with how her meeting with Miller worked out. It felt too much like a male fantasy. The guy who's loved his dream woman from afar finds her at last, and she's helpless, nude, passive, and lying down, she needs him to tell her what to do, and she readily returns his love just like he always imagined, even though she's never even met him before. It seemed simplistic. Julie was more a quest object than a character from the beginning, and her one big moment here only compounded that. Heck, just staging the scene differently so that she was upright before him or floating above him instead of lying on her back would've improved the implied power dynamic.
Although it's kind of fitting, I guess, that both Julie's first scene in the series and her last depicted her with not-entirely-convincing CGI hair wafting around in microgravity. Except Miller and the bomb seemed subject to gravity, so why wasn't her hair?
I'm wondering if the protomolecule is going to terraform Venus. Although it'd be hard to do that without water. It would've been more convenient if it had crashed one of Saturn's ice moons into Venus instead of a rocky near-Earth asteroid. I've seen that suggested in some Venus-terraforming proposals.
Yup. The planets aren't all queued up in a straight line, they're circling around the Sun at various different speeds. A lot of the time, Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun while Earth and Venus are on the same side. Or vice-versa. It's constantly shifting. Not to mention that most spacecraft/object trajectories are curved paths rather than straight lines -- ellipses or parabolas or hyperbolas or more complex loop-de-loops shaped by the gravity of the Sun and the planets. A ship with one of those high-power drives they have in the show, or an asteroid propelled by Indistinguishable-From-Magic Drive, could probably come closer to a straight-line path, but it would still be affected by the Sun's gravity and thus have some curve to it. And of course everything's in motion, so you're not aiming for where something is, but for where it'll be when you get there.
This episode actually did a lot to reassure me that they haven't abandoned good science as I feared they had. The characters' dialogue about what was happening to Eros showed a good understanding of how physics should work, and there was a good use of time delay in the communications, although it was inconsistent in the scene between Chrisjen and her husband. (Also, where is he? I thought he was living on Mars, but the time delay was only a couple of seconds, consistent with the Moon.)
100% agreement here! I thought that was terribly done. And they kissed. From her point of view, they just met and he's some random old dude. Unless there's more to it that we don't know yet. I briefly wondered if Miller was infected by the protomolecule and hallucinating or under the influence? If it is as portrayed, no tricks, then not good!
Ironically, their discussion about how impossible Eros' movements were only reinforced my opinion of how unworkable Miller's solution with the Navouu was!
Mr Awe
The show has so far been very close to the novels, with very few significant deviations. The most notable deviation being that Avasarala was introduced much earlier in the show than she was in the novels (she's not introduced until the second novels) and so far, much of her storyline has been original to the show, though still consistent with her backstory from the novels. Bobbie Draper is also introduced earlier than in the novels, but not significantly so. In fact, the last episode she was in her CO told her they were just assigned to Ganymede, and when she's introduced in the prologue of the second novel, she's on her assignment on Ganymede.
There've been some minor stuff along the way, the show for some reason overcomplicated Holden's backstory by making him the Canterbury's second officer who got bumped up to XO just before that fateful away mission (in the book he was always the XO). Likewise, the Rocinante crew was always loyal to him, there was none of the tension among them there was in the first season, though that seems largely gone this year.
The show has introduced some original content, the story last season about the spy infiltrating the Rocinante wasn't in the novels, and neither was the young Belter who befriended Miller recently. Then there's the rather confusing situation I mentioned earlier regarding Fred Johnson's nameless second, who seems somewhat close to the character of Sam in the novels, in that she appears to be a friend of the Roci crew who parties with them when they visit Tycho. Although, Sam is a dockyard mechanic, not a military officer. However, they already introduced a character named Sam in season 1, who was a computer technician working for Johnson.
So yeah, so far I'd call the show a 95% replication of the novels. It's actually a lot more accurate than the majority of TV shows or movies based on novels/comics/whatever.
What I was referring to is that in the novels, the protomolecule creates a device on Venus which creates a portal allowing ships to travel to other solar systems.
Yep, the ending of this episode is more or less exactly how the first novel ended.
Then they chose an odd place to put it. It's strangely finale-ish for just the fifth episode of a 13-episode season.
IIRC, the producers said they wanted to avoid a format of 1 season=1 book. A laudable goal, even if the execution could use some work.
Sure, but the way to do that is to make sure that the structure of the TV seasons works first and foremost as TV seasons. And it's an odd structure for a TV season to have such a major climax only 2/5 of the way in. Unless they were originally planning for a 10-episode season and got an extension. Maybe this was meant to be the midseason climax.
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